Musings
I’m in the Seattle-Tacoma Airport waiting for a plane that has been delayed six hours out of Houston, and I’m thinking about grandparenting. Or more accurately, I am thinking about the ways that one generation overlaps into the next and how grandparents in one generation are modeling grandparenting to the grandparents of the next generation.
The photo at the top of this post is my mother, circa about 1975. I recognize the sweater she is knitting for her granddaughter, my oldest daughter. The sweater is now hanging in my granddaughter’s closet at my house.
Knitting is something the mothers and grandmothers in my family have all done, except me. I need to relearn purling and casting on every time I pick up my needles. I guess that’s why I keep my mother’s knitted gifts around for the next generation. To make up for the fact that I’m not adding anything to the inventory.
Gardening is also something the mothers and grandmothers in my family have all done, including me. And my granddaughter, as you have heard often on these pages.
Where am I going with this? I’m not sure. I’m really tired and all kinds of thoughts are swirling around in my head. I just spent two days with a dear friend of mine who lives in a retirement residence in Seattle, a lovely one, with pretty gardens and elegant dining rooms. He’s happy there, as happy as one can be who has left the home he loved and who is living alone in an apartment for the first time in his life.
My mother also moved to a retirement residence, at first sharing a room with my father, and then when he passed, living in her own little corner, missing her family but making the best of it. She especially loved her twice weekly Bingo games.
I guess I’m thinking that the next logical step is for me to wonder where I will live when I can no longer manage changing light bulbs, trapping rats in my garage, and taking the trash bins out every week.
But actually I’m not going to go there. At least not right now. Not tonight.
Tonight I’m thinking about that same daughter and granddaughter, who are on a train traveling up the California coast. As my daughter announced this morning on Instagram, they are having an adventure.
I am having an adventure, too. How many times have I waited six hours for a plane? Many times. I waited 11 hours for a plane out of Delhi once, and our plane from London to San Francisco was so late once that we took a taxi to Covent Garden for dinner. Traveling is always an adventure.
Grandparenting is an adventure. Parenting is an adventure. Airports are adventures. Let me end my musings on a positive note. LIFE is an adventure! Have a great week.
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